Charlotte Gill's memoir of treeplanting, Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber and Life with the Tree Planting Tribe (Greystone, 2011) was shortlisted for the Charles Taylor Prize [See below] and then won the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize in 2012 [See below] and the 2012 Non-Fiction Book of the Year Award from the Canadian Booksellers Association, judged by independent booksellers and presented at the 2012 Libris Awards in Toronto. It also received the B.C. National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction.

According to the National Post, "Gill was a tree planter for 17 years, first in Ontario, then in British Columbia; she estimates she has planted one million trees. Today, she teaches in the University of B.C.'s online creative writing program from her new home in Powell River, but she says she misses tree planting every day."

Ladykiller (Thomas Allen, 2005), her first collection of short stories, received the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize and the Danuta Gleed Award in 2006. It was also a finalist for the Governor General's Award.

Born in London, England, and raised in the United States and Canada, Charlotte Gill is a UBC creative writing graduate whose work has appeared in Best Canadian Stories, The Journey Prize Stories, and many Canadian magazines, and has been broadcast on CBC Radio. Her non-fiction has been nominated for Western and National Magazine Awards.

Gill's father is Indian and her mother is English. They met in 1960s London, married and had three children. The family left England for North America hoping to leave behind the prejudice against interracial love as Gill relates in Almost Brown: A Mixed-Race Family Memoir (Viking $36 h.c.). Seeking the dream of life, liberty and happiness tears the family apart and results in a divorce, many grudges and decades of not communicating. Eventually Gill and her father reconnect.

Review of the author's work by BC Studies:
Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber and Life with the Tree-Planting Tribe

Almost Brown: A Mixed-Race Family Memoir
by Charlotte Gill (Viking $36)

Review by Odette Auger (BCBW 2023)

Stacking filters of culture and personality creates a vignette effect, a technique Charlotte Gill employs when she explores themes of identity in Almost Brown. Gill’s father is the main subject of the vignette and the central theme that other threads wrap around.
Gill introduces her father in an extreme close-up, like an absorbed child watching a sleeping parent. She has reconciled with him after decades of estrangement. Moving into a slow pan of the detritus of her elderly father’s life, the sensation is like watching someone taking stock of a home, as Gill pores over her father’s house where he lives alone. In one poignant moment, she describes the “arsenal of medication on the south end of the coffee table.”

Drawing the reader in through a growing intimacy, Gill’s memoir unravels with a journal-like inventory of places, relations, interactions and roles. She holds her mother’s English Catholic upbringing in one hand and her father’s Jat Sikh heritage in the other. “In my family, we seldom talked about race,” writes Gill. “Our house was a refuge, the place where we could be ourselves, a unit, without differences and unevenness.” Though, when Gill reaches her teens, distinctions do arise in how she is treated differently from her brother—from fetching drinks for her dad, to a sharper eye on how she dresses.

Gill examines cultural disparities and similarities ranging from spiritual beliefs to communication and parenting styles. “From my dad, I’ve learned … what’s the point of lamenting one’s losses and setbacks if misfortune, just like happiness, springs from a divine source, the will of God? Put on a brave face! Suffer in style! This emotional restraint aligned very well with the British stiff upper lip.”
In the sixth chapter, a broader scope is introduced when Gill gives a concise history of how the partition of India has had intergenerational impacts on her family’s journey. With life chapters in India, Nairobi, Toronto and New York state, Gill includes the forks in that path such as when her father marries her white mother and her grandfather disassociates from them. A sense of loss seeps into the story. “It seemed like an unyielding way to be,” writes Gill of her grandfather. “But we didn’t know his heart. I didn’t know his history, the places he’d come from, all that he’d seen and done.” Her own father never mentions his youth in Kenya, and all events before his medical school training in the UK are muted.

And then Gill faces the disorienting responses from other people. “What are you?” is a question she faced many times and mixed-race readers of every kind will recognize the wide-ranging intentions, from friendly curiosity to toothy malice. Throughout, Gill shares the experiences she had at different ages and her different capacities for understanding. “They knew precisely what question to ask, almost right from the start. Why did I have dark circles around my eyes? Why were my lips purple and not pink? I began to see myself through other peoples’ eyes,” writes Gill.

Not wanting to “see colour” can be viewed as a survival strategy, an attempt to move above prejudice and distinctions. Gill describes it succinctly, through the ways of her English mother who “never mentioned skin tone or race—not hers, ours, or our father’s. ‘I only saw you as mine,’ she says even now.” As a mixed-race reader, I recognize this mom, whose ability to rise above such prejudice set the benchmark. It’s admirable, and perhaps even a convenient conditioning, to sidestep ugliness and uncomfortable truths. This led to a disconnect for Gill: “I lived semi-gratefully in the gap, if not purely Caucasian, then sufficiently off-white to be lumped in with my peers in the majority. I didn’t protest or correct.” Gill describes sun tanning with her white friends, applying sunscreen needlessly. “It took me quite a while to realize that I wasn’t a white girl, at least not all the way through—a painfully slow epiphany that wouldn’t resolve for quite some time, if it ever did at all.”

Undercurrents are unspoken and curious children will seek truths in their own way. “We destroyed our things almost as quickly as they came in the door,” says Gill. “We cut them to ribbons, hungry to understand how things worked beneath the surface.” Similarly, children will also express discord in one way or another, and Gill and her siblings were no different. “We ripped heads off dolls and bashed our Rubik’s cubes with hammers. These objects were inadequate substitutes for the things they were meant to make up for,” writes Gill. “We macerated our belongings as a form of protest, a response to something brewing in our house like a bad ferment, if only we had the words to describe it.”

Gill grows up to claim those words, and in this memoir, she includes details that she later revisits to get a clearer view; a watchful tone is a constant presence in her writing. As a young girl, Gill notes her father’s weekends away in passing. These absences, however, are made concrete when she later describes her mother sifting through the family credit card statements. Secrets are uncovered and her parents separate; after their divorce, a deepening silence emerges between Gill and her father.

Her own path bends firmly away from his expectations—pursuing degrees in writing, not health sciences and spending summers tree planting, as shared in her second book, Eating Dirt (Greystone Books in association with the David Suzuki Foundation, 2011). Gill’s family has always been on the move, and similarly, her individual path circles back to a deeper and new understanding of her mother and father. By the end of the book, Gill has disentangled the differences and disconnections in her family story with the fine-tuned focus required to unravel knots. 9780735243033

Odette Auger, a member of Sagamok Anishnawbek through her mother, lives as a guest in toq qaym ɩxʷ (Klahoose), ɬəʔamɛn qaymɩxʷ (Tla’amin), ʔop qaymɩxʷ (Homalco) territories. She was recently awarded first place for Best Environmental Coverage by the Native American Journalism Association (NAJA), along with two awards in Best Column (second place) and Best Feature category (third place).

BOOKS:

Ladykiller (Thomas Allen, 2005)
Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber and Life with the Tree Planting Tribe (Greystone Books in association with the David Suzuki Foundation, 2011). (Cloth ISBN 978-1-55365 977-8, Ebook ISBN 978-1-55365-793-4, $29.95) Paperback, (Greystone Books in association with the David Suzuki Foundation, 2012) $19.95 978-1-55365-792-7
Almost Brown: A Mixed-Race Family Memoir (Viking, 2023) $36 h.c. 9780735243033

[BCBW 2023]